Some Python recently

2009-04-11

Python is very usable, and I find it easier to write in than any other language. It has natural additions that make list processing easy, hash creation straightforward, and nesting of structures second-nature. I’ve been implementing a system to translate from English to Russian. I decided to move from Prolog because it kept making my life harder when I wanted to do very simple things, and plus my professor has been through the rigors of Prolog himself and ended up reimplementing in C++.

My desktop computer BSOD’d last night for some reason. I did some investigating, and I think my OS simply doesn’t appreciate its default sound device being reset so many times; I don’t keep my Firepod on when I’m not using it because it generates heat.

Running out of space on my C: drive to which I attribute having installed Red Alert 3 since it takes 7 GB for all the expanded movie data

I worked around this by moving the entire Data folder to a place on my terabyte drive and used Junction.exe to create a symbolic link. Seems to work just fine.

Deleting a few other things and moving several more, I got my drive down to a very defragmentable 42% free, and proceeded to defrag.

My pagefile was split into about 30 different fragments.

I remedied this by deactivating it and activating one of the same size on my E: drive. Defrag success!

I’m a firm believer that even on Windows systems, there should be multiple partitions in place. A user who stores their personal data on the same partition that the operating system resides is living dangerously. I’m also not a fan of OS-dependent logical volume management. My big deal with data is that I should do as little as possible to increase the probability of data loss.

In this same vein, I avoid defragmenting until I notice a performance hit, and generally keep a bare minimum of 10% disk space at all time. My favorite tool for disk usage management is SequoiaView – an oldie but goodie.